The Internet contains a plethora of reports that are at least somewhat related to consumer products and services. The sources for these reports are varied. For example, manufacturer/providers may provide information as part of their marketing efforts. Their competitors may provide conflicting information to promote competing products and services. Nominally disinterested parties provide independent reviews, although such reviews are often prejudiced by concerns not readily apparent to the reader. Such products and services are also often mentioned “by the way” as background for other subjects, making it difficult to weed out “true” reports from a multitude of “hits” received when using conventional Internet search engines.
The Internet also contains “forum” sites where users can post opinions and discuss various issues of interest. Some of the user posts on such sites constitute “personal experience” reports wherein consumers discuss their actual personal experiences using products and services. A typical such personal experience would be something like: “I used product X and my digestion improved immediately.” In such manner, forum sites may provide valuable firsthand information from actual consumers of products and services.
Unfortunately, personal experience event reports are typically posted in free text with only nominal constraints on form or content, rendering them unstructured and difficult to identify by non-manual processes. It is therefore be difficult to identify and collate personal experience event reports using conventional Internet search engines, even when such search engines are configured to search forum sites.